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Testing was carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of a hybrid fire suppression system on aeroderivative style gas turbines. A utility company and its fire protection engineer provided the use of a Pratt & Whitney FT4 aeroderivative turbine generator to test the hybrid inert gas and water mist system on an operating unit under load, enabling the research team to assess its efficacy in real-world scenarios.

One important aspect of condition-based maintenance is the current condition of the machine. Machine condition can be determined from physical inspections, but only at long intervals as these inspections lead to lost revenue while the gas turbine is not operating.
Machine condition data also comes from monitoring of measured parameters during gas turbine operation. This typically includes a sparse number of gas turbine cycle pressure and temperature measurements, rotor vibration measurements, and bearing lubricant conditions.

After a rough year in 2013, the U.S. wind energy industry installed 3,600 MW in the fourth quarter of 2014 and 4,854 MW for the whole year. This is nearly five times more than the industry installed during its 2013 slump.

Reliability optimization is an important part of plant revenue and profit. Reliability is the ability of the equipment unit to perform its stated duty without a forced (unscheduled) outage in a given period of time.

In order to ensure safety and reliability of gas seals, the system must be properly specified and designed.
Listed below are typical gas seal system applications in use today.
Low/medium pressure applications – dry air or inert gas

GE announced recently that it has secured 10 orders of its LMS100 aeroderivative gas turbine with two customers in North America in 2Q 2015. These recent successes have resulted in the backlog for LMS100 technology to be in excess of $450 million for GE Power & Water’s Distributed Power business.

In the previous article, the author talked about how Parsons used new machining tools and techniques to make gears, and the application of the steam turbine in electric generators. Here, he discusses the first axial flow compressor.

Usually, turbomachines show satisfactory vibration levels during test runs at the manufacturer’s shop. However, vibration levels after the commissioning could be higher than desirable levels. Too often, after several months of operation, vibration could show some increasing trends.

There has been renewed interest in simple-cycle rotating equipment technology in North America, particularly in the mid-size range of 20–150 MW output per unit. I believe this heightened customer interest highlights the need for the superior capabilities of modern and efficient gas turbine power generation system in supporting the continued adoption of renewable energy.

Keynote presenters at the PowerGen Europe conference and exhibition in Amsterdam last month touched on several pressing issues that, they maintain, must be addressed if Europe is to have secure, affordable and sustainable energy in the coming years.

Siemens has delivered a steam turbine in the capacity range up to 10 MW for the first time, which operates almost entirely without lubricants. The bearing systems consist of completely oil-free, air-cooled, electromagnetic bearings.

These are excerpts from a paper titled, ‘Revamp/re-rate design considerations’ presented at the 43rd Turbomachinery & 30th Pump Users Symposia (Pump & Turbo 2014) held from September 23 to 25, 2014 at Houston, TX.

Each year the Western Turbine Users Inc. (WTUI) conference takes place somewhere in the Western U.S. At the 2015 show, Long Beach, California welcomed over 1,200 attendees. As the event celebrated its 25th anniversary this year, it was appropriate that WTUI served up an abundance of history lessons.

I am an extremely avid reader and usually devour two or three books a week. My library is packed with books ranging from the short and easy-to-read 200-page fiction crime and mystery novels to profound literary 1,200-page anthologies and historical compendiums.
But I must also shamefully admit that I frequently end up picking up all the short books and seldom have the time or mental energy to crack open any text that is longer than 500 pages. These books are just too long, have too much information and are too much of a time commitment.